What I Think About When I Think About Running

I love running, I love meditation. In this blog I’m exploring how the two fit together.

#1 The Big Twenty!

I just ran 20 miles (33 km). Next to running the marathon, this is the most important achievement in my training, which started late February with a 5k run.

I’ve been documenting my progress — yes, the mileage and times but also how meditation impacts the quality of that run. This includes measures of mind wandering, which serve as a proxy for flow, the merging of action and awareness into one.

Day to day, I work for a pioneering digital therapeutics company that deploys mindfulness training programs supporting high stress/high performance populations though our clinically-validated app, AmDTx.

As Chief of Content, I engage with clinicians, researchers and mindfulness trainers from around the world to develop programs supporting unique use cases and challenges — from anxious students, to First Responders to cancer and concussion patients. Complemented by my personal meditation practice, this work provides me with insights into the clinical and neuroscience research explaining the real world benefits of practicing mindfulness as well as the embedded benefits of the different meditation types therein, including focused attention, open monitoring; guided visualisations and compassion practices.

My run/meditation training program is laid out here, for anyone interested in the nitty gritty.

Look for an expert interview in each post, and insights drawn from the work of novelist Haruki Murakami whose memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” serves as inspiration for this blog’s title (thanks to my brother Patrick for the recommendation).

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life. Haruki Murakami

So many great running quotes out there. This one is in honour of The Big Twenty:

“Shut up legs. We got this!”